Just setting up a new Xserve with four 180GB drives headlessly (no monitor or keyboard attached). All the drives (other than the boot volume) were named the same from apple (ServerHD). In WGM, the drives would just show up as one drive. Also, if I tried to connect via AFP, only one drive would show up. I called Apple and they offered little help to configure it headless, since they don't support CLI tools.

The only work around is to attach a monitor and keyboard and rename the drives the old fashion way.

Just a heads up for anyone who wants to configure a headless Xserve with more than two factory installed drives.

I had a client this morning that had a problem with apache not starting after the 10.2.5 update to his XServe. apachectl configtest returned a good config, and running apachectl start claims to start, but it didn't.

I call support and they stopped just short of saying that if I did anything from the terminal, that they wouldn't support it. :(

Oh, and the guy on the phone argued me until he was blue in the face that the GUI *never ever EVER* edit /etc/httpd/httpd_macosxserver.conf.

1. Know what you're doing - in the context of OS X Server -
when you use the terminal. Just because you do something
a certain way on Linux doesn't make it so on OS X/OS X
Server. So if you don't know what you're doing, don't be
surprised if you break something.

2. Apple *will* support the command line, if you really need
them to...but it requires a premium support agreement
with Apple:

When I initially tried to install the machine headless and had
problems using out of the box instructions APS&S told me I had
to attach a monitor and keyboard (which I didn't have.) I asked
if we could debug it using the command line (the machine was
working well enough that one could ssh into it) they said they do
not support the command line interface.

You need a specific support option for command line
support, which I linked in my original message. It clearly
states, among other things:

Darwin layer and open source system component
support

Use of UNIX command-line tools

Just because the Xserve has a certain capability doesn't
imply it should be supported out of the box with the
standard support options (including Premier support for
Xserve). The fact that it CAN do these things is welcomed
by many people, and Apple shouldn't be chastised when
people don't have the support options and/or capability to
figure it out on their own.

Configuring a headless Xserve with more than two drives
Authored by: baokhangnn on Apr 17, '03 10:45:06AM

there's a simple solution:
just ssh into the server with the terminal and use disktool or
diskutil to change the name of the drive! While you're at it run
vsdbutil to ensure that you are running permissions on those
drives.

Yes, it's more. It also includes Pro grade support, including CLI
tools. I daresay that if you're configuring headless Xserves, you
are not the same kind of user that wants to get iTunes working
on their iMac--therefore, a different kind of tech is required.

Although this seems like a pretty simple task, it does have a
pretty simple solution: disktool. Presumably you were charging
to do this for the Xserve owner--for that value that you were
paid, you should have either known it already, known where to
look, or are sympathetic to those others that want to charge for
the knowledge that they have.

If you think that other companies wouldn't charge support for a
headless webserver config, think again.

Configuring a headless Xserve with more than two drives
Authored by: matthewshull on Apr 17, '03 01:11:40PM

How about something even simpler? Why couldn't you eject all of the drives except for the boot drive? Then rename the boot drive. Mount one of the other drives and rename it. Repeat as necessary, but the point is to only have one drive mounted at a time until they are all renamed.

Configuring a headless Xserve with more than two drives
Authored by: bighead on Apr 19, '03 06:54:54PM

I've done that with internal drives formatted all as
"Untitled". Given, unplugging IDE cables is a *censored*, but
removing one drive at a time in an xServe is not difficult.
But seriously, if you're trying to configure a headless xServe
and you can't either figure out Matt's solution or use the
CLI tools yourself, you shouldn't be configuring a headless
xServe.

Configuring a headless Xserve with more than two drives
Authored by: spartan2 on Apr 17, '03 11:58:02PM

disktool is certainly the way to go here. Once you have ssh'd
into the server, disktool -l will list all the drives. From this list
you can derive the disk numbers. The disk numbers that then be
used to rename the drives.
disktool -n diskxsy <new volume name>